From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Mon, 6 Jan 1997 20:26:16 +0000
Subject: M-I: planned socialism.end



Part 3

Bolsheviks on the Market.

 The resort to the market was a necessary step back to ensure the
 survival of the new regime. So was reliance upon small peasant
 cooperation under Workers and Peasants Inspection. But neither the
 market nor peasant cooperation were panaceas for Russia's desperate
 plight. On the contrary Lenin and the Left Opposition always made the
 planned development of heavy industry the backbone of the transition
 to socialism and vitally necessary until such time as the world
 revolution corrected Russia's backwardness. Lenin last article
 "Better Fewer but Better" makes this clear. "The general feature of
 our present life is the following: we have destroyed capitalist
 industry and have done our best to raze to the ground the medieval
 institutions and landed proprietorship, and thus created a small and
 very small peasantry, which is following the lead of the proletariat
 because it believes in the results of its revolutionary work. It is
 not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist
 revolution is victorious in the more developed 
countries merely with the aid of this confidence, because economic
necessity, especially under NEP, keeps the productivity of labour of
the small and very small peasants at an extremely low level...Thus, at
the present time we are confronted with the question - will we be able
to hold on with our small and very small peasant production, and in
our present state of ruin, until the West-European capitalist
countries consummate their development towards socialism?...What
tactics does this situation prescribe for our country?..We must strive
to build up a state in which the workers retain the leadership of the
peasants, in which they retain the confidence of the peasants, and by
exercising the greatest economy remove every trace of extravagance
>from our social relations...in this alone, lies our hope. Only when we
have done this shall we, speaking figuratively, be able to change
horses, to change from the peasant, muzhik horse of poverty, from the
horse of an economy designed for a ruined peasant country, to the
horse which the proletariat is seeking and must seek - the horse of
large-scale machine industry, of electrification...  [Lenin CW 33,
498-502 cf. Platform of Joint Opposition 1927:33]
 It was always clear to Lenin and the Bolsheviks that the workers'
 state must control the market, or the market would take control the
 workers' state. As Stalin and Co took power, they based themselves
 increasingly on the middle peasants and NEPmen. The party composition
 changed from mainly working class to mainly petty bourgeoisie. The
 Left Opposition was left fighting for a balanced plan, while the
 right argued that the market was a universal feature of socialism and
 that the Peasant should  enrich themselves.	For the Left Opposition,
 Preobrezhensky argued that the law of value and the market were in
 contradiction:  "This is the nub of the question. Whoever does not
 understand that the urgent task is to gather enterprises into one
 system of state economy which is unified, consciously directed and
 turned in a planned way in the direction which is vital to us, does
 not understand that in the struggle against the private capitalist
 sector, the state socialist sector will other wise suffer an
 inevitable defeat."
[Documents of the 1923 Opposition: 54-55].
 These warnings went unheeded by the bureaucracy but not by the
 working class. Preobrezhensky again: "Since comrade Lenin left his
 work the Central committee has made several mistakes including some
 major ones. These mistakes have one feature in common and can be
 given a general characterisation. This common characteristic of the
 Central Committees mistakes lies in that it has not proved able (as
 it was able when Comrade Lenin was at its centre) to predict well in
 advance this or that process which had spontaneously ripened, and to
 react to it at an early stage by making turns and to do so in such a
 way as not to stop half way with them...What is dragging us out of
 this somnolence?  The working class. It is dragging us out of this
 somnolence by its strikes, in other words the party is being
 spontaneously urged on to change its course." [Documents of the
 Opposition 1923: 67-68] The Left Opposition kept alive the Bolshevik
 method of Lenin and Trotsky against the Menshevik bureaucracy:
 "Bolshevism by its very nature contradicts bureaucratism. It is
 linked with the masses. It is active and practical and cannot
 tolerate the ossification that we had when the strikes occurred. Such
 bureaucratism is thus anti-bolshevik and contradicts the essence of
 our party...Why did our divorce from the working class come about?
 Because in the process of the development of the NEP we had an
 economy that was developing spontaneously and bureaucraticism was
 growing up in our party." [DLO 1923:74-75; PLO 1927:8-9] It is clear
 that the Menshevik/Stalinist position was to abandon planning to the
 market. Moreover, against the Bolshevik position, the Mensheviks
 encouraged the formation of a new capitalist class.  Right from the
 outset therefore it is bureaucracy that leads to market, not vice
 versa. The Bolshevik position was to encourage an alliance between
 workers and small peasants, and to eliminate the growth of
 speculation and wealth in the Kulak and NEPmen. Yet it is obviously
 true that the failure of the European revolution to mature in time
 left the Bolsheviks with no option but to resort to the market as a
 crutch under very difficult conditions [DLO 1927:40]. But it was one
 thing to resort to the market under conditions of extreme difficulty
 in an isolated and backward country, quite another to claim that the
 market was a necessary feature of social planning even in the most
 ideal circumstances! The bad faith of the WM and Mensheviks here is
 staggering. Not only had they opposed the Bolshevik revolution, they
 prevented a European revolution from coming to its rescue, and then
 they consolidated the hold of a bureaucracy in the USSR. Thus when
 the Left Opposition prediction came true and the market threatened to
 overcome the bureaucratised workers state,  it was Stalin's abolition
 of the market,  and not the market itself, that got the blame for the
 final collapse of "communism". 

Thus the current drift to social capitalism.  Nove covers for the not
so new right Hayek and Mises, to claim that planning a complex society
requires a market [even if not private property (Mises/Hayek)]
otherwise a bureaucracy must develop. Against this compare the genuine
mensheviks, Kornai, Polanyi, Habermas, Blackburn, Kagarlisky, who find
a place for the market in healthy planning, with Trotsky, Ticktin,
Mandel, and McNally who reject the place of the market except in a
subordinate role in the transition to socialism.  It is clear that the
mensheviks adapt to the new right by saying that markets are necessary
to plan complex societies. In doing this they reject dialectics and
the working class' capacity for social administration. They conflate
backward bureaucratic planning with genuine democratic workers
planning. They play out the self-fulfilling prophesy, that the
bureaucratic plan, crippled by the market, creates a bureaucracy, and
leads to the downfall of the plan, and the restoration of the market! 


Restoration of capitalism today.

 If the MS can claim that it was Stalin's rejection of the market that
 ultimately caused "communism" to collapse, that claim completely
 falls down in the face of capitalist restoration today. Not only did
 the market undermine a bureaucratically deformed planning from the
 very start, it failed to correct the problems which bureaucratic
 planning created over the period since. Every attempt to introduce
 market mechanisms to overcome the defects of planning, created more
 problems than they solved. Gorbachevs idealist notion of introducing
 Perestroika was a full-blown acceptance of the failure of
 bureaucratic planning and the attempt to use the market to achieve a
 balanced "market socialism". What happened?   In each of the former
 Stalinist states, state regimes came into existence committed to
 restoring capitalist social relations. The state ceased to allocate
 social labour for use, abolishing the plan, the monopoly of foreign
 trade, and allowed a new class of capitalists to invest in production
 for exchange-value. The introduction of a convertible currency, and
 private property rights, allowed the law of value to assert itself.
 As the law of value became the dominant  mechanism of allocation of
 social labour, the planned economy collapsed and has been replaced by
 state capitalist economies. While the restoration of capitalism is
 far from complete in these states, the massive destruction of the
 forces of production as a precondition for capitalist investment
 makes it clear that the market is not the road to socialism. If we
 summarise the soviet experience, the historic fact is that a real
 workers plan has never been tried. The MS are basing their case on a
 bungled bureaucratic plan  which they themselves helped to create.
 Even so, bureaucratic planning on the basis of workers property is
 vastly superior to the most ambitious MS scheme put forward today.
 Why?  MS is a subterfuge directed against planning because planning
 requires the proletarian seizure of power, as the necessary, but
 hardly sufficient condition for the transition to socialism. MS must
 defeat planning to defeat socialism. Without the seizure of power
 there can be no bureaucratic planning let alone genuine workers
 planning. Planning is insufficient for socialism in the absence of
 workers political control of the plan. Therefore what is necessary
 and sufficient is not the market, but full democratic workers'
 administration of the plan. According to the technical `fixers' this
 is possible with new techniques that would replace the market as a
 "coordinator" of supply and demand. However, they too miss the point.
 The debate is not about planning but social revolution. So today it
 is not a technical question  of computers replacing the market
 mechanism, but the development of the forces of production which
 would allow workers democracy. However, unlike those who posit the
 possibility of workers democracy without a revolutionary overturn,
 before this can happen the computers along with the rest of the means
 of production must be in the common ownership and control of the
 working class. In the light of the collapse of the Stalinist states,
 socialists today look for the MS bolt-hole. So Robin Blackburn says,
 "what went wrong in Russia" was that Trotsky's advice to use the
 market as the brain of the plan, was dumped  by Stalin when the
 kulaks began to rise up and challenge his power.  So Mandel,
 Blackburn and Kargalisky  want to go back to this idealised model of
 "market socialism"  as the way forward today too.  This
 post-stalinist menshevism  has the advantage of being serviceable
 both in Western capitalist countries where the struggle today is
 about defending the welfare state which can be extended via
 `democratic' control of the capitalist state into market socialism
 without a seizure of power! And in the collapsed Stalinist states, 
 not all is lost! If workers stop the rot towards free market
 capitalism at some point where market and state can coexist, then
 yippee - market socialism. So where does this leave the current
 default to MS?  The only reason that it has any credence at all, is
 because Western Marxists are on the defensive, always going on about
 the "crisis of marxism". Otherwise why would anybody argue about the
 feasibility of socialism that depended upon creeping public ownership
 through pension plans; a Roemer plan for "coupons plus votes"; class
 neutral supercomputers; the old Fabian demand of economic democracy
 [Meiksins Wood,1995; Schweickart, 1992], or a "fourth way" [Alexander
 et al] at a time when all over the world the more-market movement has
 brought about the collapse of the bureaucratically planned economies,
 undermined and eroded public ownership, state intervention, welfare
 states etc.  Actually existing capitalism today proves beyond
 question that it needs the law of value to survive.  It can only
 tolerate `reforms' in periods when its profits are rising. It is
 unlikely that international capitalism will experience a period of
 renewed accumulation this side of another great depression and more
 major wars. To be sowing illusions about MS in this period is like
 pissing into the gunpowder.


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Dave Bedggood,

I would appreciate your comments, criticisms etc. 


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